''! pick up most of my wisdom from celebrity interviews. " . This comes, as any J eevesian will tell you, :from "The Code of the Woosters," a book as indispensable to the alert mind of the twentieth century as '%ma Kareninà' was to that of the late nineteenth. (In the disconcerting words of one of Wode- house's Russian characters, " G. Wode- house and Tolstoi not bad. Not good, but not bad.") The Bassett-Wooster passage will strike most readers as serviceable rather than dazzling, but Eric was not most readers. What he does is place a I haft th "" f ee aki " d s as er e a 0 spe ng, an an- th b 1: th d "." f ee . . bl " o er one elore e secon I 0 VISI e, then add a note in the margin: '1\llletters of alphabet (v. rare in so small a limit)." Well, the man was mad, wasn't he? Either that or he reread Wodehouse until the sentences lost their meaning and dis- solved into their smallest constituents. Pencil aloft, Eric sat in his armchair, no- b . dth "". ". " dth "". ce e x In mIX-up an e Z ill "cognizant," and settled down to his task of utter fruitlessness. (And, may I say; he got it wrong; if one allows the capital "J" of "J eeves," should the second pencil k aft th "" f " ""' ) mar not come er e q 0 quarter r- In his tweedy way, Eric was the direct de- scendant of those medieval monks who labored, without hope of earthly reward, to apply gold leaf to the colophons of an illuminated Bible. Yet, beyond that, his marginalia suggest a desire to enter into conversation with the text-to take issue 144 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 19 & 26, 2004 . with it, as if Wodehouse were his inter- locutor. What Eric did, in brie was to live his W odehouse instead of living life. As I leafed through his exclamations- " V " "(ì,.. . I " ""^ if h . true, ",-Ulte prIce ess.., 1î..S e could possibly have done!," and, most telling, "Noone but a butler would say that!!"-it became obvious that he had long subscribed to the rilles, physical and emotional, that govern the Wodehouse universe, that he revelled in the friction- less beauty of the plots that they engen- dered, and that any slight relaxation of them caused him to wince and :frown. There is one dolorous leitmotif in the passages that prompted Eric's annota- tions. A few examples will suffice, all singled out by a pencil stroke for his tim- orous delight: Like most men trapped on the telephone by a woman, he had allowed his attention to wander a good deal during the recent mono- logue. - "Pigs Ha ve Wings." Attila the Hun might have broken off his engagement to her [Agnes Flack], but nobody except Attila the Hun, and he only on one of his best mornings.-"A Few Quick Ones." A photograph of Mae Belle McGinnis, taken when she was not looking her best be- cause Mr McGinnis had just settled some do- mestic dispute with the meat-axe. - "Young Men in Spats." What we have here is a prime case not of misogyny, for Eric was constitution- ally averse to hatred, but of that more for- givable condition known as gynopho- bia-a fear of the female sex, and of what dire metamorphoses it might, if left un- checked, wreak on the defenseless male. You hear it everywhere at the Drones Club: "How do you account for young Bingo carrying on like this?" "Just joie de vivre." "But he's married." The question is: Which came first, the Wodehouse or the fear? Was Eric prey to an instinctive prejudice, a shrinkage of body and spirit, for which he sought con- solidation in the work of a favored author, or did the men-only saturnalia of the Drones Club get into Eric's system and persuade him to remain a bachelor? And, if the latter, did he not WOrry that, while 01 some bachelorhoods may be a Wooster- ish romp ("A fellow makes himself con- spicuous when he throws soft-boiled eggs at the electric fan"), others come to re- semble a prison term, served in solitary? Whatever the case, Eric never took a wife, and, according to my mother, this deci- sion was made solely on the strength of a passage in E G. Wodehouse: She was definitely the sort of girJ who puts her hands over a husband's eyes, as he is crawling in to breakfast with a morning head, and says: "Guess who!" That comes :from "The Code of the Woosters," and it still strikes me, like all the best horror stories, as life-changingly precise. Eric must have thought so, too, because before the word "breakfast" he added the word "Monday:" One can only applaud such minute textual scrutiny: It seems to have been spurred by a determination not merely to worm oneself into a book but somehow to obey Wodehouse, as if "The Code of the Woosters" were a moral instruction man- ual rather than a comic novel-and then to tweaklitde bits ofWodehouse, forging them anew with one's Eeyore-like ad- denda, until the obedience reached patho- logical proportions. As a reader, Uncle Eric used the prose as a sealant, to harden his own heart. If that sounds excessive, consider the letter that he sent to his Aunt Adela :from Delhi on March 25, 1930: My own darling Adela, C' est terrible!! I am broken-hearted-Life is a blank and the outlook is grey. A crushing blow has befallen me. At less than a week s notièe, the Minaroo has been ordered to the B.M.H. [British Military Hospital] Lucknow,